🍊 Why the orange biz feels the squeeze

Starbucks, Chipotle, and a host of other brands all have one thing in common: TikTok rules everything around them.

The ever-changing whims of the app’s 50m+ daily active users are changing the way businesses develop and release products, per The Wall Street Journal.

Whatever TikTok wants

Restaurants are modifying menus to satiate demands and ease worker burdens.

Chipotle officially added the “Keithadilla” — an off-menu hack popularized by influencers Alexis Frost and Keith Lee — to its menu after customers trying to order it created mayhem in stores.

At Starbucks, increasingly complicated TikTok drinks have become the bane of baristas’ existence — but the coffee chain’s no stranger to the internet’s demands: In 2017, pre-TikTok, Starbucks added the customer-created viral “Pink Drink” to its menu and released a bottled version in April.

Meanwhile…

… brands from fashion to food are monitoring trends in fashion and beauty, then work at lightning speed to get a product out before the fad fades.

• Edikted, a fast-fashion company that contracts with third-party factories, can create new products in 12 days.
• TikTok’s move away from tight skinny jeans inspired Aeropostale to increase its loose-fit denim offerings, which went from 7% of sales in 2020 to 40% in 2022; it saw a 15% increase in profits.
• Dave’s Gourmet rushed to bring the viral (and controversial) Pink Sauce to market in 90 days.

If there’s any caveat…

… it’s that TikTok, and the internet in general, can be fickle. What’s hot one minute is dated the next, resulting in unlaunched products or unsold stock.

Fast fashion, in particular, has been called out for its negative impacts on the environment as it — and its customers — scramble to keep pace with mercurial trends.

That Keithadilla, though? That’s timeless.

To any orange juice fans reading this (except for those who like it in their cereal), apologies in advance.

Florida — a state whose license plates feature oranges, whose official flower is the orange blossom, whose official beverage is OJ, and whose citrus market is valued at $6.9B — is struggling to grow oranges.

The Agriculture Department estimates that the state’s farms will generate 15.75m 90-pound boxes of oranges this season. That may sound like a lot, until you realize that, just two decades ago, Florida was pumping out 250m+.

Let’s peel back the rind on this

It’s been a rough couple of decades for orange producers, per The Washington Post:

• Insects that cause an incurable bacterial disease among trees, known as greening, arrived in Florida in 1998, spurring a rapid (and ongoing) production decline.
• In recent years, hurricanes and cold spells have accelerated that decline.
• Brazil, which is typically an additional source of oranges, is also weathering its own weather-related shortages.

You don’t have to be Janet Yellen to know what happens when supplies drop — OJ prices in January were up 20%+ from 2016, according to The Wall Street Journal.

As yields declined, two-thirds of processors shut their doors between 2006 and 2016, and some of those still around are weighing a pivot to other crops.

The hope: that University of Florida scientists, who are working to develop greening-resistant citrus trees, can quickly work some miracles.

1) The cottage cheese industry is really milking the opportunity to serve the ~40% of adults who want more protein in their diets, churning out huge profits in the process. In the last year, sales have risen 15.9% to $1.2B, and TikToks with the hashtag #cottagecheese have 340m+ views, 135m of which came in the last 120 days.

2) Weddings have a lot of couples saying “I do” to debt. With the estimated cost of the average American wedding ballooning to $30k, 30%-45% of newly married couples in the US took on debt to pay for their big day. Helping to drive up the average: the 13k+ US weddings that cost $1m+ last year.

3) Does your to-do list feel impossible? Let the IRS offer some hope for getting through it: Between the 2022 and 2023 filing seasons, America’s federal tax agency slashed its backlog of unprocessed paper returns by 80%, from 13.3m to 2.6m. Want to call with your congrats? It may actually work — 35% of customer service calls are now answered, up from 11%.

4) What a site! Squarespace is hoping to continue domain-ating the website-building business with its ~$180m purchase of Google Domains’ assets, including 10m domains, as the Google unit looks to wind down.